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Opinion

Opinion

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.

I mean it, stop doing that: Mallick

We may dress it up, but basically all opinion writing — and actually I think all novels — is a variant on “Stop doing that.” I’m not usually so explicitly bossy but we live in a harsh era of trouble and strife in which guidance is sorely needed. If you need further advice after reading this — and you will — please email me. I’ll file it and respond in a majestically strict New Year’s Eve column.

Don’t read the comments. Life is sufficiently souring, you don’t need to add residue. I recently wrote a perfectly civilized column about desperate migrants crossing from North Africa to the Italian coast and commenters chorused “let them drown.”

Don’t marry Charles Manson. What’s frightening about the upcoming ceremony is not that the 80-year-old Manson seems more emotionally centred than his 26-year-old fiancée, it’s that she is clearly doing it to annoy her parents. Consider it achieved. On the bright side, no matter how deranged your loved one might be, there is still someone out there for you, Charlie.

Don’t wallow in nostalgia. It’s foolish. I understand the retrograde longing for objects in a digital age but I’m suddenly recalling something from childhood: “flashcubes.” These were squeezy shiny bulbs sold in pricey three-packs. They were treasure. On Christmas morning, your “parents” snapped them into place on top of an olde boxen (or olden boxy, for that matter) “Kodak” and pressed several buttons, one of them correct. After a “blerg” noise with no “flash” ensuing, each of the cube’s four sides turned black, the “film” was wound up by hand on a spooling device and the thing was taken to a special store where you begged a man to return “snapshots” in two weeks for $42. Invariably they were beige blurry squares (with weirdly curved corners) that lay in a shoebox self-bleaching. People complain about the ease and narcissism of the modern selfie but taking a quick photo used to require organization, persistence, cash and actual musculature. The past was awful.

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Do not open packages, especially if they’re addressed to you. Do not read handwritten snail mail out of liberal guilt about people you assume can’t afford a cellphone. They have computers in public libraries. Wear gloves.

Don’t get tattoos but if you do, don’t remove them on the cheap. That’s what family’s for. Beauteous young people tattooed with swirling branches and vines try to erase things and end up with brutal red wires crossing their arms, tubes thick as jumper cables. Sleeves are good. Also tunics.

Stop tweeting things without clicking on the link you’re tweeting. Stop taking offence. Stop reacting to my column until you’ve read the entire thing. (I’m talking about you, Mr. French Consulate guy, and it’s not France if it’s just St-Pierre-et-Miquelon.) Don’t report on a study without linking to it, don’t quote from a book without reading it. I could extend this rule into all aspects of human life — I have a personal rule that I don’t write about beheadings unless I have watched them online — but you get my drift. Follow through. Don’t tattoo that, by the way, just stick a post-it note on your computer.

Quit work. If you have a pension, retire now. Are you out of your mind? I have read that blog Top Five Regrets of the Dying and they make no sense to me — my deathbed regrets will be unprintable — but still, I don’t think that now-famous Australian palliative care nurse made them up.

Don’t read RateMyMD.com. Actually, do read it. It and its cousins are terrible websites full of spite and libel, but given the state of medical supervision in this province, it’s fascinating. If your doctor asks you to visit after-hours and “park out back” that’s not a good sign.

Cultural matters: Do follow @BadLegalLLP. Do purchase A Load of Hooey, a collection of instructive mini-essays from Bob Odenkirk who played Saul “Better Call Saul” Goodman in Breaking Bad. From him, I took my mid-century patio-style “breezy tone.”

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